this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Quick question for you. I signed up to Mastadon a while back, have been endeavouring to use it more regularly, and have been trying to sign on to as many local or often-subscribed orgs (on other media platforms). What I'm finding is that remarkably few of them are on Mastadon, and often those that are have been using them as a kind of alt-Twitter content splash with little engagement.
Are the actual active profiles/communities sort of walling themselves off from bots and bad actors in the way that you're describing? Invite-only groups whose activity isn't seen by non-members, or even accessible when searching for related tags/topics? Have I been casting about looking for content like someone looking for people in a neighbourhood where everyone is inside with the curtains drawn, or is there actually low engagement on Mastadon overall?
If you want to follow specific organizations, unfortunately, there aren’t as many on Mastodon as on other social media platforms. Some are accessible through Threads.net federation, like @theonion@threads.net, through the Bluesky bridge, or via other non-Mastodon federated communities (e.g., Flipboard.com) if that’s something you’re interested in.
However, some communities do wall themselves off from bots and bad actors. For example, the most popular Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) blocks the second-largest instance (pawoo.net). Other instances, like mastodon.art, defederate from AI art supporting instances, while others like hachyderm.io has defederated from Threads.net. Additionally, some Mastodon communities, like Truth Social, are entirely isolated and defederate from everyone else.
So, if you want access to the widest range of communities, you may need to join more than one instance.
this comment is how I learned Truth Social was based on Mastodon.
It sounds as though there's a lot more to these new setups than I had initially thought, this might take a bit of reading just to pin down the basics. Thanks for the detailed response, much appreciated, those links are going to come in handy.
.online still federates with most servers, its just .social but invite only.
Interesting, I'll keep it in mind.
It's harder to see on a large Lemmy instance like LW, but most of the fediverse is very patchwork. The network of Lemmy sites is itself very patchwork, with the MLs, Hexbear, Beehaw, NSFW, etc. all having different defederation profiles, but the whole space is an incomplete mesh. Mastodon has more themed instances than Lemmy, more very small instances than Lemmy, and a much bigger anti-capital, anti-commerce bent than Lemmy, with many more people complaining on main about other instances rules and federation policies, so if you look, you can really see it.
But the whole fedi project is patchwork by nature.
The Mastadon link is a revelation, I haven't seen any duplication of content, but TBH I haven't invested a fraction of the time there as here. The Federation is a great idea, although it's going to take a little while for me to wrap my head around all of the ins and outs of the patchwork framing.